So, I’m riding the Metro home the other day, reading Facebook on my Droid (I live in the future!) when I come across Steve Johnson’s post celebrating “awkward and maladroit metaphors, like wild horses sneezing on the rocks.” As Steve invited others to join in, I spent a couple of entertaining stops writing up my metaphor. At this point in the story, I should tell you that, in one of those strange things that my brain tends to do, I had kind of been obsessing over Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden, a book in which, quite disappointingly, the best line is in the blurb. Nonetheless, I’d been a little bit obsessed with Bizarro fiction all day, and my metaphor reflected it. Eventually, I responded to Steve with:

Celebrates horses sneezing on the rocks, like a hunchbacked angel in mismatched shoes wandering the streets of Calcutta and drinking despair through a straw.

Yes, I know. Not really all that great. I freely admit that “inspired by” does not, unfortunately, equal “as talented as.” (Exhibit A: Lada Gaga. Madonna. Case closed.)

Nevertheless, the image nagged at that part of my brain that says, “Hey, write something about this.” I ignored that part of my brain (as I usually do of late), but it didn’t seem to work. So I tried sending it into a drooling stupor by watching some summer television. Still didn’t work. I even tried numbing it with alcohol. That made it worse.

So finally I just wrote the fucking thing. It’s below the fold. Probably slightly NSFW, depending on where it is that you happen to work. At the very least, it should convince about 90% of my friends to block all my posts. Assuming that all the philosophy crap hasn’t done that already.

Picture an angel walking down the street. No, not that kind of angel. This one doesn’t have wings or a halo. He’s not beatific. He doesn’t exude a heavenly presence from his cherubic body. There is no sublime otherworldliness. He isn’t floating on the aether. None of that medieval Raphaelite painting shit.

No this angel is in mismatched shoes. He also has a hunchback. And a skull that doesn’t completely enclose his brain – a brain, I might add, which is at least 40% too small for his misshapen body. His misshapen mouth is devoid of teeth, which is just as well, as his palate has a hole big enough that he could shove most of his right hand inside without much difficulty. Not that he would have any interest in putting his right hand inside the hole in his mouth, as said right hand is busy clutching a McDonalds’ straw. Omey – that being the name of our disharmoniously-shod, hunchbacked angel – Omey is currently squeezing the shit out of that straw as he wanders the streets of Bumfuck, WV.

I know what you’re thinking: all towns in West-by-God-Virginia are bumfuck, WV. But the residents of Bumfuck, WV are actually from Bumfuck, WV. Twelve years ago, the mayor of bumfuck-West-Virginia-before-it-was-Bumfuck, WV got tired of having his town referred to as “bumfuck,” so he slipped a proposal to change the town’s name into the bottom of the city council agenda, then got the entire city council shitfaced on Absinthe, which he had secretly slipped into the coffee urn, and he then convinced the council to vote to change the town’s name to “Bumfuck, WV.” So now the town is officially Bumfuck, WV, WV. It’s very confusing to the old lady who runs the post office in the town next to Bumfuck, WV. The mayor thinks that’s an unexpected bonus. The bitch once let her cat shit in his begonias.

Wait, so where were we? Ah, yes. Our inconsistently-shod angel, with his hunchback and his tiny brain hanging out of his skull and his misshapen mouth, and his right hand clutching at that McDonalds’ straw, and his person (angelson?) wandering the streets of Bumfuck, WV (population 3571). In mismatched shoes.

So how, you might ask, did an angel end up with mismatched shoes, a hunchback, an unenclosed tiny brain, a misshapen mouth, a straw, and a stroll in Bumfuck, WV? For the answer to that question, my friends, you have to understand a little bit about God.

See, for the first few eons, God was really fucking bored. Yes, there was a universe, but it was pretty dull. Just a lot of unformed chaos. There wasn’t even anything separating the heavens from the deep, if you can even imagine that shit. So one day God said to Itself, “Sam” (“Sam” being the name that God called itself back in those days when God decided that It needed some conversation). “Sam,” said God (referring, you understand, to God, but just using a different name), I think We should make some shit. And Sam said unto God, “Groovy.” And so God proceeded to create Man.

Later, God realized that Human 1.0 was kind of a bust (think Vista only harrier. And smellier.) So God created Human 2.0, added some better graphics and built-in a new Common Sense feature. Hoping to build on the “Man” branding, God dubbed Human 2.0 “Woman” and then kicked back to enjoy the show. Mostly that show resulted in Man running around hitting other instances of Man and raping Woman while Woman explained that Man was being Really Fucking Stupid while trying to hack the Common Sense module into the Human 1.0 architecture. Generally that mostly resulted in Man running around doing more of the hitting and the raping. And appointing Supreme Court justices to give them legal cover.

God regrets the error.

But not enough to fix it.

“So how,” you ask, “does this relate to our angel with the unmatched shoes?” Well, you see, God didn’t really care all that much about creating Man or Woman. Mostly God wanted to create television. Because, again, God was really fucking bored. And if boredom is a problem, FiOS is the motherfucking answer.

And once Man and Woman finally stopped the hitting and the raping – and the being hit and raped – long enough to invent television…well let’s just say that God and television were a match made in heaven. Which is not even a metaphor in this case.

See, God loves It some television. Especially British television. God loves It some television so much that it turned into the very first Fan-Deity. Possibly the only fan-deity, unless you count Ganesh, who is really into Babar-LARPing. But most of you don’t know who Ganesh is. Or Babar. Or LARP-ing. And even if you did, know all those things, you probably wouldn’t count Ganesh as a real deity.

Anyway, God the First (and possibly only) Fan-Deity gets seriously obsessed over certain shows. It learns all the best lines. Comments on all the blogs. Goes to the Cons. Wears the costumes. Collects mementos (prize items: Spock’s uniform from Star Trek II, the original script from the pilot of Red Dwarf, and Joss Whedon’s ability to write a season two.) And did I mention obsessed? Hell, for a three week period, God actually turned Itself into The Doctor, threw on a scarf and ran all about heaving saying, “Who’s the Time Lord now, bitches!” All of which is a little annoying, but mostly tolerable.

Until God discovered Python.

Let me just tell you that there are few things worse than a deity who sings along to Every. Fucking. Python. Song. It was during one such Python-obsessed period, just as God got to the chorus again, that It decided that maybe every sperm really should be sacred. And so God said, “Let There Be No Abortions Until the End of This Song.” And so it was that little baby Omey somehow survived his mother’s D&X, and nine weeks later had his little hunchbacked, anencephalic self live for 18 of the most agonizing minutes any baby has ever known.

Now you might think that you understand misery. You might have stubbed a toe or had your heart broken by that girl you were just sure was The One back when you were in the 9th grade. You might even have accidentally lit yourself on fire, and then gotten caught inside the threshing machine, and had your burning limbs ripped off of your body and then had to lie in a ditch waiting for help while watching the crows snack on your barbequed severed limbs. And yet that would still be nothing compared to those 18 minutes. For you understand what life is. That it can be sweet and happy. That good things exist which help balance out the shit of missing your left leg. You understand that the pain, while horrible, can all be chased away with just the right combination of morphine, low-grade smack, and a giant fucking bottle of tequila.

But for the entire 18 minutes of his life, Omey knew pure despair. There was only pain. Always pain. No understanding, no hope, no vague experience of a life that was not constant and unending pain. Pure. Fucking. Despair. The kind that even the vilest of demons in their wretched lairs working with the best of CIA-approved torture devices can spark only for the briefest of instants when the planets have aligned perfectly. And Omey felt that for the entire 18 minutes of his life.

In the 19th minute, Omey died.

And things got even shittier.

See, one of God’s early rules was that children who died as infants were still “pure” and untainted by “original sin.” God didn’t actually make up that “original sin” bit. That was invented by some dude who felt bad about all the maidens he’d coerced into giving it up and, having been born before the advent of therapy, compensated by decreeing that humans must just be born as sinners. But not being a total asshat, he made an exception for babies who died in infancy, claiming that their souls were, as yet, untouched by evil. So little baby Omey got classified as pure.

Of course, being pure, there’s really no room for improvement. If you’re pure, you’re fucking pure. How do you improve on pure? You don’t. What’s to improve? Nothing. So Omey got to go into the afterlife with his hunchback, his exposed brain, his misshapen mouth, and his memories of unending pain and despair. He went through Angel Training complete with his constant pain. He tried to learn all the Really Important Lessons, but it always seemed as if he just couldn’t keep anything in his head. Which is not surprising, considering that his head couldn’t even manage the fairly mundane task of keeping his brain on the inside. He tried to participate in Angel Hosanna classes, but Omey could never manage to Lift His Arms On High. Which is not surprising considering his giant hunchback. On Angel Field Trips, Omey couldn’t remember how to do even the simplest of angel tasks, like regenerating his Angelic Glow by drinking in The Beauty of All Creation. Which, again, is not all that surprising since Omey has a giant fucking hole in the top of his mouth. Plus the whole business of not actually knowing what The Beauty of All Creation really is owing to an 18-minute lifetime of pure and total despair.

Indeed, Omey just couldn’t manage to pass a single angel class.

Eventually, angel school gave up. The headmaster made a personal (angel-sonal?) appeal to God Itself to please just Do Something with Omey.

“God,” said the headmaster, “Omey can’t seem to lift his arms to sing hosannas.”

“Then send him somewhere that people don’t really lift their arms or sing hosannas,” replied God, who was mostly annoyed that he was missing his fourth viewing of s.4, ep.7 of the X-files. (That’s the one where Mulder believed but Scully was skeptical and Mulder turned out to be right and Scully got just one little step closer to believing.)

“But God,” said the headmaster, “Omey won’t survive as he can’t regenerate his Angelic Glow by drinking in The Beauty of All Creation on account of his not knowing what beauty really is.”

“Then let him drink something he knows about,” said God, who really wanted the conversation to be over before he got to the scene where the really weird shit happened so that the audience suddenly knew that Mulder was right all along and could mutter during the commercial break about how they knew Mulder was right. “What’s he know about, anyway?” God asked, sure It would regret prolonging the conversation.

“Despair?” ventured the headmaster.

“Then let him drink despair,” said God, growing increasingly annoyed as It realized that prolonging the conversation had indeed caused It to miss some words in the crucial scene in which Scully claimed that some crazy thing was impossible but Mulder said wasn’t.

“But God,” the headmaster dared one final time, “Omey has trouble drinking on account of the hole in his mouth.”

“Then let him drink from a Me-damned straw!” God roared.

And so it was that Omey brought his mismatched shoes, his hunchback, his anencephalia, and his straw to the streets of Bumfuck, WV, a place full of people who knew much of despair but nothing of the meaning of the word “hosanna” (and why should they, you elitist fuck?)

“But wait,” you ask. “Haven’t you forgotten the most important part? What’s the deal with the mismatched shoes? Why must Omey wander the streets in mismatched shoes? What about this poor sod requires him to wander about in two different pieces of footwear? What oddity? What further punishment? What strange quirk of God’s television-besotted self? Why must Omey suffer the indignity of sartorially-conflicting footgear?”

Calm down, my friends.

The shoes are just a fashion choice.